THIS is not a new book - it first appeared in 1979, and curiously enough the present edition does not appear to have been updated, since the final pages relate to the predominantly racist South African republic which no longer exists. That, however, is largely irrelevant now to the chronicle of a war that has entered Irish folklore in general and the Dublin folk memory in particular (as a young journalist I met many Irishmen who had fought in it, and even a former Dublin Fusilier who had served in the Afghan War of 1880. An enormous man, nearly blind but still compos mentis, he was then nearing his century.)
The Boers were not an attractive people, though they had their virtues - courage, independence, a love of hard work, family spirit, Biblical piety, stolid endurance and devotion to their cause, even if that cause was not a very good one. The Orange Free State and the Transvaal were carved out by those Boers who disliked British rule in the Cape Colony and trekked north across the rivers and veldt to found their own republics. They were mostly tough, simplistic, Old Testament Calvinists who believed that God favoured the God fearing and hardworking; accordingly He had given them the land to work and profit by, and, even more considerately, He had supplied the Black African to do the unprofitable chores. These "Kaffirs" were considered an entirely different and inferior species from the Whites - not entirely sub human, perhaps, but a kind of homo insapiens, an intermediate creation between the animal kingdom and the Chosen Race.
When gold and silver and diamonds were discovered and mined, white men of other races began to pour in and these Uitlanders became a problem for President Kruger and his fellow countrymen. To grant them full citizens' rights would imperil their own position and facilitate an ultimate British takeover; to treat them too harshly was a recipe for rebellion and/or intervention. The Boers, in any case, had their hands full keeping down their own resident Black population and in defending their frontiers against Zulus and other native powers. Though Kruger in his narrow, homespun way was a genuine statesman who wanted peace (according to his own definition, at least), he and the British Empire were sailing on a collision course.
The tragi farce of the 1895 Jameson Raid, launched from Bechuanaland into the Transvaal, became an international incident. The sharpshooting Boers had no trouble in mopping up this abortive invasion by a small force, and Kruger, with great shrewdness, handed the leaders over to the English for justice. The resultant inquiry ruined the public standing of Cecil Rhodes (who was the main motive force behind the raid) and came close to wrecking the career of Joseph Chamberlain as Colonial Secretary. By lies, subterfuge, bullying, and threats, Chamberlain managed to cover up his considerable degree of complicity, before the whole situation was unwittingly defused by the German Kaiser at his most blundering. His telegram of congratulations to Kruger caused an outburst of chauvinistic fury in England and turned Jameson, almost overnight, into a hero.
With his fingers singed if not burnt, "Radical Joe" Chamberlain now aimed to keep things quiet in South Africa, but force of circumstance, financial and imperial ambitions and, above all, certain key individuals conspired to force his hand. The chief agent in this was Britain's new High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, later famous as a member of Lloyd George's War Cabinet. Milner has gone down in history as an exemplar of the British proconsular type at its ablest and most far seeing, but he was also hand in glove with the formidable financiers Beit and Wernher, and his ultimate aim was a South Africa united under British rule and British business interests. Subtly and remorselessly he turned the diplomatic screws on using the grievances of the Uitlanders and the racist policies of the Boers as propaganda points: "peace was on his lips, while war was in his heart."
After a peace conference at Bloemfontein in 1899 had come to nothing, Kruger, seeing plainly what was coming, was convinced more than ever that "It is my country that you want!" The war began some months later; it was no petty colonial revolt, but a clash between sovereign powers, though in terms of relative strengths it was homespun David against the khaki Goliath. The Boers had certain advantages to compensate for lack of numbers they knew the terrain and were at home in it, they could cope with the climate, and they were fighting for their homes and lands. They also had plenty of new Mauser rifles and had managed to buy some heavy artillery, chiefly from Lord Lansdowne, a mediocrity, ruled at the War Office in London while the Army itself was split between the "Africans of Field Marshal Lord (formerly Sir Garnet) Wolseley and the "Indians" headed by Field Marshal Lord Roberts. (The percentage of Anglo Irishmen involved is quite remarkable). The officer finally sent out to command in South Africa was Sir Redvers Buller, a competent, decent man and a soldier's soldier, who has been poorly treated by history and maligned by his enemies. Today Buller is remembered only by his defeats at Colenso and Spion Kop, though these were forced on him when White, one of his subordinate commanders, wrecked the overall strategy by allowing his forces to be cornered in Ladysmith. In the end Buller fought his way over mountains and rivers, and Ladysmith was relieved; but in spite of other successes his reputation never recovered and the taunt "Sir Reverse" followed him until his death.
Roberts succeeded him as C in C, with Kitchener as his Chief of Staff, and later Kitchener succeeded Roberts, who by now had outmanoeuvred his old rival Wolseley and supplanted him at home. The names of the battles and sieges wake dormant memories - Mafeking, Kimberley, Moddersfontein, Driefontein, etc. Roberts captured Pretoria and Johannesburg, but the Boers fought on, abandoning their traditional wagon trains for mobile guerrilla warfare and finding some remarkable leaders in Botha, de Wet and the young Jan Smuts.
The British then resorted to concentration camps in which thousands of Boer families were shut up, with many of them - especially the children - dying in miserable conditions. Boer homes and farms were also destroyed ruthlessly and methodically, since it was military policy to "starve them out". Kruger, now a man without a capital or even a country, sailed for France and it was left to Botha, Smuts, De Wet and a few others to sign the surrender terms at Pretoria in the summer of 1901.
The Republic of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State vanished out of history, surviving only as provinces. The names of the British officers who fought in the war read like a roll call for the Western Front a decade and a half later: Haig, French, Plumer, Rawlinson, Allenby, Smith Dorrien, Byng, Gough.
Kitchener himself is shown as a monster of egoism, ambition and brutality, as well as being quite inept as a field commander (a fact which some trained observers had already noted during his victorious campaign in the Sudan a few years before). Roberts, Pakenham says, was "no fool, and no genius," though the laureate of jingling jingoism, Rudyard Kipling, had extolled him in prose and verse as a great soldier and patriot, and the English public dutifully believed it (Kipling's chronic fatuity, incidentally, is one of the more trying features of the whole chronicle; he is almost always at hand, ready to propose some vainglorious obsequious toast or give wind to stanzas of rhyming rant). Rhodes, who died before the war ended, appears to have been detested and distrusted, in roughly equal measure, by almost everybody who knew him.
The British public was shaken to the core by early reverses and by the manpower losses, not to mention the cost of the war (£200 million, a colossal sum in those times) and its sheer length (nearly three years). Compensatory legends grew up of Boer marksmanship and Boer horsemanship, though what had really been demonstrated was that the quick firing rifle had changed warfare and that frontal attacks by massed infantry led to heavy losses. The lesson was not learnt, however, leading to the mass slaughter of the Somme and Third Ypres in 1916-17.
Milner, the prime mover of it all, later went into banking and made a fortune before becoming an elder statesman and a peer, as well as a national and imperial oracle. Within a generation of his death, South Africa left the Commonwealth and "declared a republic, based largely on a debased version of the old Boer beliefs and values. It is now, of course, largely controlled by the Black majority which had been so arrogantly exploited for generations.